Gloria Steinem and Leymah Gbowee channel their bond into a new book

Leymah Gbowee, the Liberian peace activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, says she doesn’t pay much attention to celebrities. With one key exception: that time she first met Gloria Steinem. “I was just starstruck,” Gbowee confesses to The Associated Press of the moment a mutual friend introduced her to the feminist icon. “Everyone knows of Gloria, regardless of which continent you come from.” Steinem, for her part, protests that she’s not any more of a star than Gbowee.

“She’s a GLOBAL celebrity,” the famed activist, now 91, says of Gbowee, 54, who won the Nobel in 2011 for her work promoting peace and women’s rights in Liberia. In any case, their introduction two decades ago — via filmmaker and fellow activist Abigail Disney, who’d made a documentary about Gbowee’s peace movement — led to a strong friendship, separated by an ocean but fueled by shared commitment to social justice. “Their spirits were in sync,” recalls Disney. “I said: ‘My work is done here. You guys do your thing.’”

Steinem smiles when repeating the phrase “sister-friend,” a term she says Gbowee invented: “It just expressed how we felt.” Now, the friendship — and that phrase — has led to something tangible and colourful: “Rise, Girl, Rise: Our Sister-Friend Journey. Together For All,” a picture book for kids. Dubbed “a journey of activism, sisterhood and friendship,” it’s both a joint biography and a call to a new generation to fight for equality.

With vivid illustrations by Kah Yangni, the two women trace their childhoods, young Steinem traveling the United States in a trailer with her antique-dealer father, over “miles of highways fruit stands, gas stations, diners,” and Gbowee in Liberia, “a land rich with timber, ripe with hopes for a new tomorrow.” They learn about injustice and inequality in their countries, and grow up to fight it — meeting as adults around a kitchen table. The friends spoke in separate interviews — Gbowee from Liberia, and Steinem from her Manhattan brownstone — about their friendship, their book, and that kitchen table.

The two of you live on different continents and have fought different sorts of battles. How did you get to know each other?

GBOWEE: Gloria and I were introduced by a mutual friend, Abby Disney, many moons ago. And from that time onward, I was like, “If I ever need to talk to you, can we? And it was “Yes, yes, yes.” And it’s been that way for a long time. When I was pregnant with my daughter (now 16), we had the baby shower at Gloria’s home.

STEINEM: I remember her as a kind of global, amazing figure who somehow from Africa to the US, through Europe, everywhere, is a unifying figure and unifying storyteller. .... I mean, she IS the movement. Look at her life. She’s an inspiration, whether we’re talking about an ecological global save-the-trees movement or about women’s equality.

You’ve spoken about how a conversation with Gloria — at her kitchen table — influenced your decision to stick with the feminist movement at a time you were struggling, and ultimately inspired this book.

GBOWEE: It was our Easter Sunday conversation in 2009, where I was really feeling funky about being in the feminist movement. Did I want to stay? Did I want to leave? And she said to me, “One of the reasons you feel the way you’re feeling is because you need a sister.” She was telling me about how she had all these sisters from Alice Walker to different people she used to go on trips with, they didn’t need anything from each other, just to be there for each other. She said, “That’s the kind of person you need, that you can be very vulnerable with.” It was a beautiful conversation.

What made you want to write the book together?

STEINEM: First of all, we wanted to communicate, to write, to somehow connect with each other despite the global distance. ... I think that as children, we were interested in stories and were ourselves storytellers, as well as consumers of stories. We also had a relationship to the natural world, which perhaps is true for most children. Just a sense of kinship with trees and flowers and gardens.

GBOWEE: During the pandemic, I started writing a lot. Someone put me in touch with Scholastic and I sent a manuscript and they looked at it and said, “Let’s talk some more.” I raised the issue of wanting to collaborate with a few individuals. And once I said “Gloria,” they were like, “Do you know her?” I was like, “Of course I know Gloria!”

The two of you describe your childhoods in the book, and it’s striking to read that you weren’t introduced to regular school until you were about 10 years old.

STEINEM: Until the sixth grade. We lived in rural Michigan in the summertime ... And in the wintertime, my father always put the whole family in a house trailer and we were working our way, buying and selling antiques and so on, to Florida or California. I think my family thought because I was always reading books in the back seat, that was enough.

It doesn’t seem to have set you back.

STEINEM: Well, I’m probably still lousy at math.

What age is this book directed at, and is it for girls?

STEINEM: (Laughing) I mean, it’s called “Rise, Girl, Rise,” but I think boys could tolerate that title, too. Girls have read “The Hardy Boys” for years and other boys’ books and felt connected.

GBOWEE: They say from age 11, but I would say I’d read it to my seven-year-old grandson. I would read it to my five-year old grandson. None of my kids have children, but I have daughters of the heart and they have children. So they’re my grandchildren. And that book is appropriate for them. The message of love and acceptance and everything else is something I want to pass on to them.

Your home seems to be the centre of constant meetings of activists from around the world. What have you been discussing recently?

STEINEM: There’s a continuing series of meetings going on in my living room, sometimes initiated by me, sometimes by other people. We’re all certainly concerned with the political system in an electoral sense. And, you now, we live in a democracy that’s one of the few in the world that’s never had a female elected leader. That’s kind of ridiculous. I mean, we’re choosing from half the country’s talent.

Associated Press